“The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
While on a recent drive with a couple of granddaughters to their ballet class in the northern part of Rhode Island, we traveled on I-195, a tiny portion of the massive 47,000-mile-long Interstate Highway System. Originally conceived of by President Dwight Eisenhower, the same logistical mind that organized the triumphant Allied effort to destroy the Third Reich, it was enabled after he signed into law the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. The bill committed to pay ninety percent of the costs in each state for a webwork of fine roads with a minimum of four lanes, well defined dividers, and no grade level crossings allowed — a system of limited access, high speed highways tying together every major population center across the country. The interstate system was planned as well to permit rapid military deployments of huge quantities of hardware, personnel, and materials of war should that ever become necessary.[i]
As was also presumed, commercial and residential development was planted and cultivated along these roads, changing the landscape from farm and forest to housing, manufacturing sites, and ubiquitous strip malls for good or ill. But jobs followed, providing mobility, opportunity, and prosperity for millions.
For those of us who were around before these amazing roads were commonplace, they replaced the two and four lane roads like Route 1 and Route 66 that delivered the means for all road trips. They were comparatively slower and less safe for high-speed travel with multiple on-grade crossings requiring safety controls like stop signs, traffic lights, and backups. When 95 was almost completed through Masschusetts, I was a teenage driver. The wide, fast, impeccably paved highway with limited access was built, but not yet open, the temptation for many, including me, was not to be denied. One clear fall afternoon, we bypassed the barriers. I found a way on to the highway with an older friend who owned an early Jaguar XKE. The Jag was a money pit, but it could fly. With no police, no other cars on the road, and our youthful sense of invulnerability, we buried the speedometer at 140 miles per hour. Many others tried their luck, and I heard of no fatal errors. The lane divider lines were a blur at that speed.
(Writing): “most of the time it’s more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress.” Piers Anthony[ii]
As I ride now over these skillfully engineered and constructed roads, sometimes I’ll remember some of the site engineering I studied as part of my forestry course work. After extensive surveying for the proposed paths of these wonders, the data was worked hard (mostly by hand on paper or calculator in the fifties and sixties). Then came the exacting tedious slog designing the bridges over and under the proposed highway with sufficient clearances, planning the exits and entrances with drivable curves, and plotting to level within acceptable tolerances the slopes to maximize fuel efficiency up and down elevation changes of thousands of feet.
One critical calculation was the necessary cuts and the fills. Over thousands of miles over every terrain imaginable, the planners considered every soil type that must be utilized or discarded or blasted or scooped up and moved with tens of thousands of pieces of equipment and construction workers. Optimizing millions of cubic feet of earth to be moved is a gargantuan calculating challenge. Perfect optimizing to control construction costs aimed for the dirt dug out (cuts) to balance with the dirt required to raise the elevation of the road where it needs to be raised (fills).
When we traverse a raised section of the road and look down into a pastoral valley, or when we cut through a defile between fifty foot high solid New England granite vertical cuts towering on both sides, every drilled hole and blasted face was sheared off and hauled elsewhere. When we pass under or over a bridge every place the highway intersects a river, a marsh, a crossing road large or small that local people need to keep their communities together, we seldom note that someone surveyed, calculated, and designed it. Others blasted, dug, welded, compacted, carefully poured concrete to exacting standards. Every mile is a triumph of engineering, persistence, and dedication.
We blow by at seventy miles per hour heedless, listening to our tunes and podcasts, chatting with our companions, our minds wandering with the tedium of a long drive.
It occurred to me there are metaphors lying in these cuts and fills.
“A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.” Alexander the Great[iii]
Alexander of Macedonia changed the world, paved the way for the later Roman Empire, and established his dominance over a vast territory from Macedonia to Egypt and from Greece to India. He was a brutal, sometimes cruel, and brilliant general and leader of soldiers. He was a gifted orator and well educated in Greek philosophy. He died after a hard bout of drinking led to a catastrophic health collapse at the age of 33. Alexander was complicated.
Our pastor told a story last week I had never heard. As he lay dying, Alexander called together his closest advisors and generals. He commanded three things concerning his funeral arrangements. No matter how odd the instructions were, no sensible person would disobey a command from Alexander, even a posthumous dictate. He demanded that his casket be carried to his burial place by one person alone, his physician. The path to his burial place was to be strewn with all the coins and jewels in his possession. Since he was an acquisitive conqueror, there were a lot of coins and jewels. And finally, as his body was carried, his dead arms were to hang down from the sides of the casket with open and empty hands. These instructions of despair and final failure were despite his seeming great success acquiring every possible human honor.
What can be made of this bizarre story? His physician, who was presumably one of the most able in the whole empire, could not preserve his life. We are all destined for the grave. The wealth that he had so aggressively and successfully amassed was so much detritus, good only for pavement to the dead Alexander. His hands, empty and open at his birth, would be empty and open upon his death. As many have written, including in the Bible. We bring nothing into this life and take nothing away from it.
“So walk on air against your better judgement.” On the tombstone of Seamus Heaney from his poem “The Gravel Walks.”
Getting back to our cuts and fills. Surely, if there is any meaning and purpose to it, the question is where does the road we build over our lifetime lead? What is its meaning and purpose? And how are we harmonizing our daily lives to that purpose and meaning? What cuts and fills need to be made in our lives to build our road once we identify the destination? What needs to be added, and what needs to be cut away? How painstaking is our survey and analysis? How well is our highway mapped out and the way to build it understood?
What is primary and central in my life? What do I worship? i.e. Honestly and without self-deception, what is of highest worth or most valuable [iv]to me? Do I desire ardently a deep relationship with the Creator of the universe or make do with some inferior creature which can never satisfy? All our false gods are addictions, which can never satisfy and demand ever more feeding to achieve the same level of temporary satiation.
He knocks on the door, that is what He does, the Hound of Heaven. Do I swing it wide open and invite Him in? Or is the door blocked with the clutter of my life slowly accumulated since my youngest days? How frantically have I avoided the quiet time necessary to comprehend the meaning of my life?[v] “I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him.”[vi]
Is the addiction most central to my life the praise and honor of others? Must I measure myself by pleasing others, counting “likes?” Do I need to cut that deeply out and fill the hole with genuine humility?
Is what most important to me my own pleasure, my entertainments, and distractions, satiating my needs, emotional, physical? Do I need to cut that deeply out and practice a lifestyle more ascetic, less focused on my own wants and given over to serving others, to seeing others with the eyes of Christ and responding to the necessities they lack, and I take for granted?
Is the hidden focus of my life power, the ability to control my immediate environment and people with manipulation? Do I expect deference from those with whom I share my life? Do I need to cut that deeply out and live to identify and obey the will of my Father?
Is what is most dear to my heart an ephemeral wealth of expensive trivialities and trinkets that will be scattered on the path to my grave, the accumulation of an imaginary security that cannot possibly last or satisfy. Do I need to transform my heart and to live more simply in gratitude because everything I have is a gift, including even my life? As St. Ambrose said more than a thousand years ago, if you have two coats, one of them is yours, the other belongs to the man who has none.
Unexpected roadblocks and pitfalls will inevitably befall us, but most importantly is our road aimed at the right destination?
“He will provide the way and the means, such as you could never have imagined. Leave it all to Him, let go of yourself, lose yourself on the Cross, and you will find yourself entirely.” St. Catherine of Siena
One of the great errors of our times is a sort of spiritual inversion. At best we think that seeking God is on us, our ascent, on us and the quest we are most comfortable with: we fantasize that we control it. No, we don’t. We can’t. And most tragically, we don’t need to.
There are several parallel metaphors in this post. The first is the Master Excavator and road builder Who will make the right cuts and fills if I only ask, grit my teeth, and try hard enough. The second is the Hound of Heaven Who is the pursuer, and the One knocking at our door. He never breaks down the door, but persists and persists and persists, never giving up on us. That is the master point of this mixed metaphor post: our most egregious mistake is to assume that it is we who must fill the gap and climb the hill and forge our way to a union with God. We control the process. We cannot possibly attain the mountain top with our own efforts, but quest’s goal comes to us if we only open ourselves to His tender mercy.
One short story to exemplify what we’ve been exploring.
Occasionally over the years we have had the great blessing of carrying the Eucharist to someone homebound, including each other when one of us was down for the count.
Last week in doing that I met a man in dire circumstances. My new friend’s hair was white, thin, and disheveled, but clean; a barber had not visited him in his recent past. His health was imperiled, and his skin was gray. He could barely walk due to neuropathy. When I knocked, he called out a welcome, asked me to come in, and visibly struggled to sit up.
He lived just over the line from abject poverty and slept on a tattered sofa in a mobile home with crumpled blankets. The air was foul with cigarette smoke permeated in every piece of furniture and clothing, his refrigerator had no doors, just a small camper style fridge propped on a small platform kept what little food he had from rotting. An old cat wandered about freely and evidence of its incontinence was spotted across the faded rugs.
He was welcoming, looked me in the eye, knew all the prayers, and was eager and grateful to have the Blessed Sacrament. He couldn’t stream Mass from our parish for there was no television or computer. There was a worn unframed picture of Jesus taped up on his wall.
A homeless guy he had taken in was sleeping in his bedroom, the only other room in the home. Do I have a homeless guy sleeping in my house? Have I taken in someone who needs shelter? He has. With very limited resources and declining health, he shares what he has. It is his habit.[vii]
When I pronounced my part of the prayers and held out the Blessed Sacrament to him, he stared intently at it, leaning forward to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus. He yearned. Do I yearn with such gratitude and desire for the Miracle and the Mystery? Or do I heedlessly line up for the miracle at every Mass, a Mystery not fully acknowledged or appreciated? Do I understand in my core that the God/Man invites me to be that intimate with Him? To take Him literally within me. I think my new friend who also takes in the most destitute among us does so appreciate and so acknowledge. “Behold the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world.”
“Lord, I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.”
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.” Revelation 3:20 (New American Standard Bible)
[i] The main arteries are numbered in the fives for roads running north and south and progress from west to east. Route 5 along the Pacific Coast, then 15, 25 etc. all the way to the road that was created through my hometown, Route 95. 95 runs parallel for the most part to the Atlantic Coast from Houlton, Maine to Miami, Florida. Truckers usually refer to them as The Five or The Ninety-Five. The roads spanning west to east are numbered from south to north, thus 10, 20, up to 90, which in my original state Massachusetts runs from Boston to the border of eastern upstate New York, passing through the Berkshires. It ends in Seattle, Washington, crosses the Mississippi River from Wisconsin to and the northern Rockies in Montana. The system uses a large number of bypasses near major cities. The main highway usually passes through, and the bypasses help move the traffic around the congestion. Near us is 195, 295, 395, and 495 which routes pass through traffic around Boston and Providence.
[ii] Piers Anthony is a much-published British fantasy and science fiction author. Created the fictional world of Xanth.
[iii] Alexander the Great conquered one of the largest empires in human history by the time he was 33. “One of the world’s greatest military generals, he created a vast empire that stretched from Macedonia to Egypt and from Greece to part of India. This allowed for Hellenistic culture to become widespread.” (from Encyclopedia Britannica.)
[iv] The etiology of “worship” is from Old English, where it originally conveyed the idea of something being worthy or valuable. What is my highest value and aspiration?
[v] ChatGPT seconded my most faulty memory when I asked it to confirm a fragment that haunts me: Here is its summary: “Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, wrote in his “Pensées” (Thoughts) that the worst problem of modernity is the inability of people to sit quietly for an hour by themselves in a room. In one of his famous passages, known as the “Pascal’s Wager,” he reflects on the restlessness and distractions that prevent individuals from contemplating deeper matters. Here is a paraphrase of the relevant passage: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Pascal was expressing concern about the constant distractions and noise that prevent people from engaging in introspection and contemplation, which he considered essential for understanding deeper truths and finding meaning in life.”
[vi] I once memorized as part of an English Literature class with a brilliant Jesuit scholar at Boston College Francis Thompson’s classic “Hound of Heaven.” I could have saved myself a lot of pain and hurt for myself and others if I had listened to it more attentively.
[vii] Deacon John in our current parish held a training session for us and a few others just beginning to serve here. It was a retraining for us as we had been trained in past parishes. His was the best yet, inculcating into us the profound gift and responsibility of acting as the hands and feet of Jesus for others. He said, “Never forget, you are Christ, bringing Christ, to Christ!” Just so. When I told him about how it went when I went to the home of the man I described above, Deacon John said that he believes if we get to Heaven, we will be joyful to wash the feet of guys like him. Score two for Deacon John. Just so.
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